formatting external hard drives

[whitehawk]

I use Mac and Windows currently, although I do most of my work on the mac side. The thing is, my mac is probably going to die sooner rather than later and my next computer will likely be windows only.

I have a couple of questions really. I just bought 2 1TB drives to put photos onto (1 is a backup drive of the first, mirror image.) I'd like to be able to use it from both OS's, so that rules out HFS+. So I'm to fat32 vs NTFS. Also wondering about having them be GUID vs MBR - I have no clue.

Thanks for any input =)

[GTriever]

For Mac plus Windows use (if I remember correctly) you're limited to FAT32. For a windows-only system, I'd do NTFS format for its advantages. (Remember, in FAT32 you're limited to a 4GB file size.)

Regarding differences Between MBR and GPT Disks:

MBR disks are supported (readable) by all Windows operating systems.
GPT disks are only supported (readable) by Windows server 2003 SP1 +, XP 64-bit, Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008.

MBR disks use the standard BIOS partition table.
GPT disks use extensible firmware interface (EFI).

MBR disks supports up to 2TB per single partition.
GPT disks supports up to 256TB per single partition in Windows.

MBR disks supports up to 4 Primary partitions or 3 Primary partitions and 1 Extended partition with up to 128 logical volumes in the extended partition.
GPT disks supports up to 128 Primary partitions.

Removable disks are MBR disks by default.
Removable disks cannot be converted into a GPT disk.


For the windows-only system you've outlined above, I'd do NTFS on all disks, and would configure the (2) 1TB disks as RAID1 (as you have it) with MBR partitions.